Modern-warfare RTS/sandbox game inspired by the real conflicts in the Middle East. Fight a counter-insurgency war, protect the civilian population, casevac your wounded and decide how the world sees your struggle. And remember - no one gets left behind.

IntroductionInvasion Machine is a blend of a sandbox manager and RTS. Your goal is to command troops in an occupied province, in an effort of bringing back peace and order. Kill your enemies, help the civilian population, preserve the resources and the lives of your own soldiers.

The SettingWhat led to our recent occupation of this land is still at the center of a heated political debate.What followed the invasion, was the worst scenario we may ever have imagined - we hoped we’d be able to instill better leadership and let this country rebuild itself. But that’s not what happened, though. Our toppling of the local government created a power vacuum in the area - which is now quickly leading to an unprecedented rise of new powers - the druglords, locally known as Guerrillas. If we don’t stop this transformation, this entire country is gonna explode. We were not preparing for this kind of wae, and it seems it’s the last moment when we can still turn things around.

You, as the Commander of this Peace Force are tasked with restoring order and preparing ground for a new, legitimate government.

The MissionIf we’re to ever leave this land, we must first win over the hearts and minds of the local population. The locals think we’ve ruined their lives and quite frankly - most of them hates us. In order to win their trust - we must do our best to push out the criminal element, neutralize the remaining opposition and offer humanitarian help to them.

The Real MissionPoliticians run wars, and politicians only care about one thing - getting re-elected. In other words - your real job as the Commander is to make this war look good to the folks back home. Don’t get your soldiers killed, don’t lose too much equipment, and most importantly - don’t let the press see anything that would contradict the official story. And the official story? It’s obviously that we’re winning.

The CampaignDivided into 8 chapters. The game takes you through the entire story of the invasion, starting right after the main battle of the war ends. At the beginning you are given just a handful of troops and old, derelict equipment. Unarmored, soft-shell transporters on the frontline? Check. Woodland camo in a desert country? Check. The army wasn’t really prepared for a long invasion, and yours is just one of many missions in this conflict. So if you want better resources - you’re gonna have to prove to your superiors that you’re worth them. The campaign ends once you manage to secure your province and hold elections. When a new government can be trusted with taking the country over, we finally get to go home.

What will you be doing in the game?• Killing your enemies (car ragdoll, shoot, turret)• Using progressively better equipment• Arresting those who you don’t kill• Disrupting the drug trade• Driving cars and leading convoys through conflict area• Evacuating the wounded• Hiring translators• Retrieving damaged vehicles• Getting ambushed• Completing side tasks, crucial to keeping your bosses happy• Sending out patrols• Providing security in key locations• Searching for contraband• Controlling how the press sees this conflict• Gaining intel on enemy forces• Maintaining your relations with the locals

At the same time, your enemy will be:• Trying to gain intel about you• Patrolling• Assassinating your VIPs• Kidnapping your VIPs• Retributing against locals who cooperate with you• Ambushing your patrols• Setting off IEDs• Making money off contraband sale• Trying to push you out of the province

What sets this game apart?You’re supposed to preserve your units - your enemy might not treasure the lives of his soldiers, much - but you don’t have that luxury. This means casevacing the wounded and using tactical advantage when possible.

Your units are not mindless robots - kill their friend, and they may enter frenzy. Hurt them, and they’ll quickly start bleeding out.

Your enemy has no satellite overview of the battlefield, like you do. To fight your forces, they first need to find out where you are. This means the AI will send out recon missions of their own - and if the scouts find high value targets - they’ll report the findings back and call for bigger operations.

The locals don’t really have the option of being completely neutral. If the enemy presence is strong in the province, they’ll start cooperating with them, instead of helping you out.

Although inspired by real wars fought in the past decade, this game depicts a completely fictional conflict and is not an attempt at social commentary. The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used herein are fictitious and any resemblance to the names, character, or history of any person is coincidental and unintentional.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:This game is serious in tone, and attempts to depict the despair of a modern armed conflict. You can expect to see gory violence, death, drug trade and mistreatment of non-combatant civilian population. When shot, your wounded units bleed out and there's sometimes nothing you can do about it.

I've created some confusion with the release date. The store page states that the game launches tomorrow, but unfortunately this isn't the case. I've decided to delay the release for 4 weeks - till November 6th.

The reason for this is because lately more people started playing the open alpha version of the game - and pointed me to some still-prevailing bugs that I find unacceptable to launch the game with. You might have seen the recent coverage on Youtube, where the guys reviewing the game infallibly get overwhelmed with the chaos in the gameworld. And, although they're funny and chill about it - makes the game barely playable for them.

So - I will fix all that, while also adding more tutorial messages to the game and make the learning curve a bit less brutal, but I need a bit more time.

And because recent changes on Steam make it harder to adjust the already-published game release date, I'm still in the process of properly updating that, and this is why the page still shows the wrong date.

...and I know how this makes me look.I feel like I'm really testing everybody's patience with this, but the game needs to be delayed again - the build that I currently have as the alpha still just isn't ready to go to the early access, yet.

I still plan on releasing before the end of the year, but've been (reasonably) asked by Steam to stop changing the release date all the time, so for now it's displayed as "coming in Feb 2020". But this is the worst case scenario, and I will soon update you all with the actual date.

I have a number of issues that need addressing, among them:1. Some major issues with pathfinding2. Enemy AI tends to clump all together into one big easy target for you, on every engagement. This is boring, too simple and provides little tactical challenge. I'll be making some major adjustments here.3. Any interactions with the locals (stopping vehicles, searching the houses) completely block the rest of your gameplay, and need reworking.4. other, general look & feel things that will be very awkward for new players. In the past, this for example included no simple way of giving the move/ engage orders to your troops, but a recent update already fixed this. When I say look & feel, this is the sort of issues I'm trying to address.

So in the end, I could release the game already, but it wouldn't still be a good representation of the future finished products.

Sorry again, the game still gets updated daily, andthe Open Alpha is still available and downloadable, from the game's Discord server: here https://discordapp.com/invite/G4zX63s . The project isn't canceled and nothing's really changed - I'm working on it same as before, I was just bad with my planning.

In preparations to the proper early access release, I've just closed down the open alpha section of the Discord. The interest in it has been and continues to be greater than I anticipated, so once the game is available - I will start preparing the Closed Beta program. More information, as always, available on Discord.

tl;dr; The alpha is done. Next up is the Early Access, and closed beta within it.

The machine is about to get startedInvasion Machine is almost here. There's been delays, but every on of them meant more time for the crunch (yay) and more fixes.

The first build to be publicly available will feature a single game mode - the sandbox/freeplay, where you don't try to complete a specific mission, but rather keep your AO in check.

You can expect some major limitations at first, though:

• saving/ loading will be disabled• the UI lacks many quality of life features, but I'm adding them one by one• the AI is sometimes dumb, but also is getting improved with every patch• the general roughness of interaction

In general, if you feel that an early access game isn't for you - that's fine. You can let it mature a bit before you get invested, just maybe wishlist if you haven't already. I'm not your usual gamedev studio - I've been here a while, and I'm not going anywhere. The project will be progressing.

What you can expect of me - is a lot of attention to realism, dillemas of a modern conflict and depth of the simulation, and I don't mean it as in marketing-talk. This isn't your usual RTS, will never be, and will look into areas probably no other game in the genre ever does.

tl;dr; I haven't been updating this page lately, mostly because I've been keeping busy with the development. But the big news is here - the game launches into early access on February 26th.

tl;dr; Early access means in this case the same thing it usually means - the game will start out as an incomplete product, with big (and sometimes much needed) updates planned for the next few months.

Let me start off by thanking each on of you who already decided to support the game. The current build stresses the "early" part of an early access, and what you're playing right now is just a fraction of the game's future content. I know it has it's problems, and I'm working on them.

I've been saying before that this game is not a typical RTS title, and thankfully pretty much all of you understand it and are on board with my ideas. That's great, and now that the first week after the release is behind me - I'm ready to move forward with the project.

Updates and common Issues

Some of you are reporting commonly occurring issues, some of them rather severe, so at this point I'm focused almost exclusively on bugfixing. There's already been one release since the update, with the next one coming this week (most likely on Thursday evening CET).

If you already have the game in your Steam library, please make sure you have the auto-updates enabled for it (right-click on the game title and select game settings). This game will be updated a lot, and you'll want to play the latest version of it.

Of the worst still outstanding issues we have:

• car pathfinding (often failing to find the quickest route, as well as getting stuck in the far village)• unreadable UI (too much transparency, not enough contrast, overlapping windows)

Both will be addressed in the coming weeks. I won't even be mentioning game crashes and smaller usability issues, missions getting stuck, etc. - because all those things have been brought to my attention and are being worked on as well.

Roadmap

I will be working on a nicer, a little more interactive roadmap in the coming days, but before it's ready, let me just list the nearest term plans here, so you're not kept completely in the dark until it's up.Note: I know not everyone has Discord, but if you do, and are interested in this game, you can join here: https://discord.gg/G4zX63s - we discuss the game daily, probably most of it will never end up on Steam until I create the next update.

Having said that, here's the steps:

Bugfixing

I cannot continue adding more layers of complication into the game until I fix some blocking issues. I think the most important one here is the car pathfinding (I'm actually working on it right now) - at times it's plain pitiful. Before I continue adding more features and complications - I need to bring it up to a more acceptable state.

Soldier specializations and loadouts

Basically, the game's right now missing both the marksmen (for both you and your enemies), and the machinegunners for some more effective suppression. I consider both those roles essential for the game. Along with that, I'd like to add a first layer of troop customization, where you'd be able to select the general loadout of your men (the weapon, and therefore the role; med supplies; additional ammo). Along with it, the unit dispatch menu could use a do-over, because right now it's unnecessarily complicated.

Garrisoning/ destructible (and rebuildable) buildings

Right now neither your troops nor the enemy can shoot from within the buildings. Also, right now, even if you drop your CAS directly onto a building - it won't touch it, or the people inside.With the update, you'll be able to take over buildings (after first breaching and searching them), even with civilians inside (they'll hate you for it). Your men will be able to use the openings as firing positions, and explosions will be able to collapse the whole structure.Demolished building will be rebuildable for both the civilians and your men (to their previous shape and function), with the use of a new resource - the building materials.

More densely populated map, more POIs

With the map being a rather desolate place right now, it will be time to add more unique (and functional) structures. There's gonna be at least one more village, inaccessible to vehicles, located on high ground.There's gonna be new unique structures, serving as possible social projects for you to develop - a water distribution center, a power station, a factory, farmland and cellular network infrastructure. All destructible. All rebuildable, each with it's own effects on the local life quality.

Politics

Both your faction and the enemy will be able to send political figures on campaign trails. This will mean a constant political tug of war between the factions, causing you to more rapidly lose civilian support if your only strategy is a military domination.

Saving the game

I know many of you consider it an essential feature (I also think it's understandable), so while I had my reasons to delay it as much as possible (both because along with future game updates, your saves are gonna keep getting broken, and because it's such a heavy task that as I work on it - it will pause other progress on the game), due to popular demand - I'll be adding it sooner. You win

Structure Building

Because it should be a big part of a more permanent presence of your units on the map, you should be able to build various defensive structures. Sandbags, machinegun nests, traffic checkpoints.In the end, I'd like the player to be able to build a permanent combat outpost of sorts, which he'd later have to re-supply using his convoys.

Smoke cover, explosives and APCs

Right now your enemies are somewhat powerless against you. With their rusty AKs and the occasional technical, your men completely dominate the map most of the time, so in this update I'll introduce RPGs, mortars, more technical units and some old APCs for your enemy.

Your men will get access to smoke cover, AT weapons and new MRAP units.

Long-term goals

The points I described above are just the first steps. For one - the community is constantly feeding me with ideas, and I haven't yet added any of them to the list. On top of that, there's some bigger projects planned, which will change the game quite a lot.

Special Forces

SF units with their own, new missions. Recon, snatch and grab, and anything we come up with together.I don't want them to become just infantry with beefier stats, but rather another flavor for the game.

Helicopters

Troop transport for your own men, as well as a quick means of casevac. Will be a scarce resource, with big penalties for your relations with the high command, if lost.

PJs - an additional unit you won't get direct, full control over. Similar to fire support, you'll be able to call them in, and will be tasked with preparing and keeping a secure LZ for them.

Tanks and other mechanized units

This game is mostly about infantry. I want it to always be a story of a handful your men, having to deal with an overwhelming task given to them. Tanks and other advanced units will never play a major role in the game, but I'm open to adding them as additional fire support units, in limited quantities.

The enemy will also get their own tanks, in even more limited quantities.

tl;dr; this is the list of _some_ of the things coming to the game. Because many of you've been asking where is this project going - I tried listing the features that I think will affect the gameplay most.

This is not a complete list, nor does it mean that I will stop accepting your ideas. Think of it as the starter roadmap, with more to come later.

* fixed: units exiting your vehicles will no longer bump into other cars or flip them around. If a unit doesn't have enough space to dismount - it might remain in the car.* fixed: units hovering in the air after leaving their vehicles near the Quasir village.* fixed: cars randomly stopping in the middle of nowhere in certain parts of the map. Was caused by invisible colliders left over from a legacy vegetation system (invisible trees). With those invisible trees now gone, there will also be less strain on the physics system.* fixed: wrong troop positions when leaving houses in the Quasir village, and in all other parts of the map with high elevation - the height test looking for a free spot for them was working wrong if the terrain was too high* fixed: the vehicles waiting for the rest of their convoy will no longer block traffic. this should fix the traffic jams caused by enemy convoys getting mixed up with the civilian traffic* fixed: the translators were unrecruitable in the villages* fixed: as you reset the game map, your previously earned command points will now get reset to the default value* fixed: as you reset the game map, your previously developed social projects will now be reset as well* fixed: as you reset the game map, your CAS assets will be reset as well* fixed: car engine sound will no longer be played for wrecks* fixed: cars being far away from their convoy will no longer beeline straight back to it, cutting through the obstacles. Instead, they'll try to navigate back to the convoy using the same methods other traffic works on.* fixed: cars would previously sometimes drive straight into a stopped vehicle in front of them, as if the AI didn't see it (it actually didn't)* fixed: cars will now also detect when they get stuck as driving in reverse, which will cause them to look for a different path* fixed: if you try to link up the convoy on itself (link the convoy lead vehicle back to it's child), the game will no longer crash.* fixed: in some cases the car wasn't effectively trying to steer away from head-on obstructions* optimization: vehicle pathfinding was doing excessive calculations (not actually leading to any better results), overwhelming the nav system. This has been fixed, and should result in a massive reduction in CPU usage for pathfinding* fixed: cars would before try to drive, even while still waiting for their path to get calculated. This caused them to drive in a circle for some time.* fixed: the cars can now reverse to their destination instead of always trying to do a three-point turn every time you order them to move to a nearby location behind them* fixed: cars will no longer kill civilians when reversing into them* fixed: flattened the road to the border village (Quasir, the "far village"), because civilian cars were getting stuck on it all the time* fixed: game crash when an enemy patrol couldn't engage your troops* fixed: you can no longer try to inspect cars belonging to the high command* fixed: as you attempt to remotely control a convoy, the lead vehicle will now always be selected for you* fixed: the lead vehicles in convoys will now be less likely to drive away far from their immediate convoy child. This should reduce the convoy rubberbanding* fixed: it was previously possible to order cars to drive to point above ground, because of a bug in the order-issuing UI* your cars placed on the main roads will now block the traffic. this means you can use them for making a barrier between your men and oncoming traffic, as long as the vehicle has occupants or there's at least one of your men near it. Drivers stopped this way will over time get impatient, however, causing you to lose relations points with the locals.* if the player hits his own units with CAS, it's gonna cause much more stress for all his units, as well as more severe penalties.* increased penalties for attacking civilians with CAS* CAS can be temporarily disabled if used ineffectively by the player (if spammed left and right, with no valid targets in range)* CAS now costs command points* (tiny little surprise. if you've been around on the Discord server, you'll recognize it)* changed the player evaluation scores, so that any attacks against the local population will be more severely punished (this will still need more balancing)

* NEW: both sides of the conflict now have their own machine guns and sniper rifles* NEW: units firing the new sniper or MG weapons will only have about 70% accuracy, unless they have a relevant perk (marksman or machine gunner)* NEW: units will now have their individual, customizable loadouts. This is a first version of the system, and for now it's only useful for selecting the weapon for your soldier. I will be using this a lot in the future, though, for defining that kind of special equipment a soldier can use.* fixed: better models for the existing rifles* NEW: some weapons now have an "optics" parameter, changing the awareness radius of the soldier using them (as long as he's actually aiming through the scopes)* NEW: enemy cars will now spawn from a second location (behind Shatra). In the future I will of course add a few more locations, for now this is a test.* NEW: when idle, units with scopes on their weapons will now start scoping their surroundings, from time to time* NEW: there's now both a proper sniper unit in the game, as well as regular rifleman with a designated marksman role. Both are using appropriate weapons.* NEW: proper use of the Buddy Medical Aid - from now on, for the buddy aid to be performed, the victim must have their medikit on them. If they don't, the soldier performing the action will use his own medikit, which may later be a problem if he himself gets shot. This is marked in the action's label, before you decide to issue the order.* cars with turrets mounted on top now get a big accuracy penalty if they're driving fast. Before, it was way too easy to just drive the car at speed at shoot at stuff.* fix: the previous updates caused your cars to drive into the location of the "Drive here" button, instead of the place where you opened the splash menu. Fixed now.* fix: multiple changes to the sniper-engage action. Fixed the aiming time (longer), accuracy (more realistic - stationary targets easier to hit, very high accuracy on the first shot at the target). The sniper might now also reveal his position if he misses his shot.* fix: snipers will now track the vehicle their target entered* fix: the enemies will now recognize when they're being overpowered with a longer-range weapon, and instead of running into the shooter blindly, trying to close the distance (and getting mowed down easily), will at least try to suppress their attacker, even when outside of effective range.* fix: there was a bug previously, where the units were incorrectly calculating their line of sight, causing them to see enemies they normally shouldn't at all be possible to (this caused them to attack enemies hidden entirely behind the terrain or buildings)* when you randomize (reset) the game map, enemy snipers will now also be created* fix: previously in an engagement, your units would try to re-acquire a target which has already left the scene, causing them to never disengage even if the target was actually already too far to present any danger* changed the traffic stop action. Previously, your men would only stop some of the cars, based of a calculated "suspicion level". But since this wasn't clear enough, it's now been changed and the unit of traffic duty will now stop every passing car, unless it belongs to bluefor.* increased the artillery damage radius* fixed the vehicle and passenger scroll lists to always be starting at the top, instead of the middle of the list* you can now see the unit's loadout details when you open the selected unit's details window* adjusted the farming action, so that the villagers will no longer try to farm a field in another village, cause this caused too long trips* the second gas station is now active (the one in a village near the map's border), it should work the same way the previous one does* you can have multiple wreckers now, if you buy an additional one using the Command Rewards window. Also fixed an issue which would let you make a wreckerception (pick up a wrecker with a wrecker, then pick up that wrecker with a wrecker, then...)* fix: enemy convoys of more than 3 cars would previously always get stuck when getting spawned. fixed now.* fix: multiple fixes to AI convoys spawning, it's going to be must more solid now. Previously the convoys would get all tangled up, with the lead vehicle spawning behind it's followup cars, often causing them to immediately get stuck.* fix: AI convoys used to get tangled up together if two AI missions were getting spawned at once. This is fixed now.* fix: after a long gameplay, sometimes new AI missions would stop getting spawned if you didn't clean up the wrecks and dead enemy units

The last post I made was about the development roadmap, and I've gone radio silent. At least that may have been the impression if you're not on the game's Discord (you don't have to be there if you don't want to, I'm just trying to say that Discord is to me a much more immediate form of interaction, so I'm mostly posting the updates there). So, for all those of you who want to see the updates here - this is a summary.

What happened recently

The last update introduced many under-the-hood changes to the game's mechanics. It allowed me to make custom loadouts and weapons for your troops (even if it's not yet used to the full capacity), added new, random loadouts for the enemy and introduced some new weapons. It may or may not look like much. On the tech side - it was required to prepare the game for the more interesting updates in the future, like equipment tech tree.

And what about the roadmap? What's happening now?

It's still valid. I'm actually beginning to work on garrisoning + destructable buildings, which will be another one of those big (and long?) developments, but will transform the gameplay quite a lot. Enemies will be hiding in buildings and shooting out of them. You'll be able take structures over. It's gonna be fun.Nothing changes in terms of the plans for the projects.

Nearest update - next week

Because garisonning will be a big update, I'm first preparing something smaller, to tide the active players over. Next week I will release version 0.3.6, containing multiple bug fixes, some major changes to the map, and a more complicated mechanic for building Social Projects (you'll now need to stockpile and guard construction materials to move your projects forward).With that released, I'll be back to working on the planned roadmap step, as described above.

And what about the bugs?

There's now a couple of places where bug can be reported - here, on Discord. But in the end, I'll be gathering them all in a publicly visible bug list, where you can see what's been noticed, what's been fixed and what's about to get released in the nearest patch. The list is here:https://trello.com/b/BQiZ1I7t/invasion-machine-bug-tracker

If you don't see a bug there - it might not have been reported, yet.

When will I be able to save the game?

After garrisoning, I'll start working on game saving. I wanted to wait longer, for technical reasons mostly, but it's the most often requested feature, so - you (will) have been heard. It's gonna be the next priority.

tl;dr; I'm still not posting updates to Steam forums often enough, to the point where some people thought the project's been abandoned. That's not the case - the daily updates are always posted to Discord (cause it's a much more immediate form of discussion, so it captures attention more). I will update more often here as well, from now on.

tl;dr; Next week there's an intermediary update planned - it's gonna introduce many changes on the game map, take care of some of the often-reported bugs and make some larger changes to how you build Social Projects on the map

This one is about the long standing gamebreaking bugs, and the promised change in developing the social projects

This week's news

The minor update I promised recently is now out - bumping the game to version 0.3.6.The goal of this one was to give you some of the patches for long standing bugs, because I didn't want you to be forced to wait for them until I'm done with the nearest big roadmap development (the garrisoning).

So, to keep things short, the most important changes in this one are:

• You can no longer develop social projects if you don't have construction materials stockpiled near it (or just loaded intoa car parked near it). You can choose the cargo your car leaves with in the dispatch menu, similarly to how it was done before.• Your dispatch will no longer get broken after a longer playthrough (this was actually caused by civilian vehicles entering your unit roster by mistake). This bug was in the game since the beginning, but I only recently was able to reproduce it myself, after I got a game log from one of the players.• There is new areas on the map. A new town and a farmland area.

I will now start working on the next step of the roadmap - the garisonning in buildings/ destructable buildings. This will be a big undertaking, again requiring me to write quite a few new systems and interactions, so you can expect this update to take a while. I will keep posting updates about it. By "take a while" I mean 3 weeks, or so.tl;dr; there is an update out, with changes to the game map, bugfixes to the most annoying bugs (well, sans pathfinding) and a new "stockpiling construction materials" mechanic, now required for developing the social projects. Next update will be the garrisoning in buildings / destructable buildings, but it will arrive in 3 weeks or so.

Nearest planned updates (and when are the game saves coming)Mon, 1 June 2020

You've been asking about the game saving - so when it's coming to the game?

What about the game saving?In short - I'll be working on it after the nearest updates. Truth be told, this is a feature I was always going to delay as much as possible, because for me to add it into an incomplete game means I will have to be tweaking and reworking it with every future upgrade I do.

To say even more - making the game saveable is probably the single biggest task in the entire project.But having said that - this is also the single most requested feature for the game, so - you (will) have been heard. Once I finish the nearest updates - I will begin implementing the saves.

So what comes before it?I'm currently working on making the buldings destructable. This is the first part of the "garrisoning update", planned to come out in a few weeks. When the entire feature is complete, you'll be able to raze entire buildings with CAS (though it definitely will not be encouraged), rebuild the demolished structures to regain lost support, as well as use the buildings as protection for your troops. The same goes for the AI units, who in turn will start using the buildings for their ambush missions.